The New Interface
If you are like me, when you saw the new CRM 2013 navigation you said hmmm while you casually rubbed your chin in a analysis type posture. Then you probably started thinking well it is definitely more touch friendly than CRM 2011 (which it is). It has a neater look. In addition to the rest of the UI modifications it is certainly a drastic change from the window pop-up forms based system we had previously. Like most major feature changes to the product I believe this was a good first try. A step in the right direction we’ll call it. I realized this is a version 1 of the menu system, but there is one problem that becomes glaringly obvious as you start creating a system that has more than a few entities…. It doesn’t scale!
The Problem
As the size of a system grows the number of entities tends to grow with it. The problem in the current UI is that the menu system only allow for 2 rows of display. This works fine when the number of entities is relatively small and I imagine the product team created a few dozen entities and felt that the 2 row display was enough. Now enter the system with hundreds of entities… say 300+. Now that 2 row display doesn’t work so well. The best you can do is to edit the site map to scale out on the main menu as much as possible, but even this is still going to realize the same issue. The problem is that not only does a 2 row display not scale, it also contain very large buttons that take up a lot of space. The end result is users have to scroll many times to reach the entity they wanted to see. If you are using a mouse you will find yourself in trouble if you accidently move off the menu because it will disappear altogether which means you have to start scrolling all over again from the beginning.
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The Solution
If you’ve been using other Microsoft products you have seen the obvious similarities in the way they look and operate. Take the windows store application. It has a menu system that is similar to Dynamics CRM 2013 but yet has a different display style such as below.
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The beauty of this menu system is that not only do the major categories stand out but the sub menu items are smaller and scroll to the right. This provides a much more scalable menu and I imagine the Windows 8 team took this into consideration when creating it.
The good news is I believe that in an update in the not too distant future we will see this same style menu system in CRM 2013. Do I have the inside scope on this being in the product roadmap? No, but it is a no-brainer as they say. The other products are moving to this menu style and CRM would benefit from this adoption as well. It doesn’t seem like it would be a big lift to make this happen, but depending on what priorities have been set it will come sooner or later. For now if you have a system with a large number of entities you’ll have to be more creative on how you organize your site map or come up with some other navigation alternatives.
One alternative for managing a large site map is the CRM 2013 Quick View Menu. Certainly a great effort by by Rhett Clinton MVP, Ramon Tebar MVP and Mario Cantero. It effectively takes the site map and renders it in an HTML web resources which you can put into a dashboard.
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They made it “look” like a windows 8 start screen but it does not behave like a Windows 8 start screen. We have played around with this on my current project but the problem we have faced is that it doesn’t take user security into consideration and we have so many entities that the display literally takes about 30 seconds before it becomes visible. The other thing about it is our users are still on Windows 7 so the Windows 8 style is a little out of place in a way. In any case it’s a good start and I like the direction it is going in. I think as the software is improved it will become a highly utilized site map add-on for many deployments.
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